Asajj leapt high over the sudden death spitting from the cannon attachment at the end of Solis’s arm. A cabinet exploded in a shower of debris. Ventress was swinging for the girl, but the Force was strong in Scout, too, in this place and hour, and her parry was there before the killing blow could fall.
Whie swept out his lightsaber. The room was bedlam and fire, the smell of smoke and hot metal.
Another prickle of premonition shivered up Scout’s spine and she gasped, seeing Ventress use the subtlest of Force grabs to lift the forgotten neural eraser from Fidelis’s metal hand. “Solis!” Scout screamed, as the trigger punched down. “Behind you!”
Too late.
Lines of blue flame streaked along Solis’s spine. “Run!” the droid shouted. He fired at Ventress with mechanized speed and accuracy, sending a stream of superaccelerated metal through her left leg. The neural-net eraser took hold and he was shooting behind her; and then he was shooting at nothing at all as his limbs jerked and spasmed. Whie, white-faced, watched him start to die.
“Come on!” Scout shouted, grabbing him by the collar. “We’ve got to get out of here and find Master Yoda!”
She dragged him through the far door, and the two of them raced up into the unfamiliar house. Sirens were going off and bells were ringing. They turned down a corridor at random and Scout sprinted toward an archway that seemed to lead into a large entry hall. She stopped dead as a burst of blasterfire came spitting through the arch. “All right—next choice,” she gasped, and they picked a different door.
Behind them, Asajj Ventress tore a length of cloth from her own shirt and wrapped it around her bleeding leg, growling. The wound wasn’t critical, but it hurt, and she meant to make the Padawans pay for it. She pulled the makeshift bandage tight and sprinted after them, growling deep in her throat. She darted down the same passageway, following the sound of blasterfire, and leapt through the doorway into the great entry hall of Château Malreaux. “Now I’ve got you!” she snarled…
…And found herself face to face with Obi-Wan and Anakin. “True as you tell it,” Obi-Wan said, ever urbane. “But what are you going to do with us?”
Behind him, Anakin’s lightsaber hissed into sizzling life.
Ventress turned and ran.
“Blowing up, your house is,” Yoda remarked, peering at the various holomonitor displays with interest. A light blinked on the comm console. A special, red light. Dooku stared at it, then tore his eyes away.
“Message,” Yoda said helpfully. “Answer it, should you?”
Sweat was running freely down the Count’s face.
“Or maybe someone it is you do not want me to see. Your new Master calls. Dooku, ask yourself: which of us loves you better?”
“I serve only Darth Sidious,” Dooku said.
“Not my question, apprentice.”
The red light blinked. There was another explosion from downstairs. A siren went off, and several of the holomonitors began to flash.
“Come,” Yoda said urgently. He put his hand once more on Dooku’s arm. “Catch you, I said I would. Believe you must: more forgiveness will you find from your old Master than from the new one.”
A rush of panicked footsteps, and the housekeeper burst into the room. “Master, which there are Jedi in the ballroom. They’re coming to take my Baby!” she shrieked.
Dooku flicked through the security monitors until he found the ballroom. “Ah,” he said. Something in his face seemed to freeze, and die. “I see you brought your protégé.”
“Understand you, I do not,” Yoda said.
“You didn’t mention bringing young Skywalker,” Dooku said, pointing to the holomonitor. “And Obi-Wan, too. That changes the odds considerably. There’s your Wonder Boy now, fighting the assassin droids I have standing sentry duty at the front door.” His hand was wonderfully steady now. “Your new favorite son.”
“Bring him, I did not!”
“And yet, there he stands, with Obi-Wan. A miracle and a prodigy to be sure. I suppose you left him under cover. Perhaps you missed a rendezvous. So easy to lose track of time, chatting with old friends,” the Count said.
In the entryway, Whirry was shifting from foot to foot in extremes of agitation. “Please, Master! Don’t let the Jedi steal my Baby again! Do something for me, for all my hard work, Master?”
Dooku glanced up. “Do something for you?” His eyes flicked to Yoda and the lightsaber at the Jedi Master’s belt. “Of course I’ll do something for you.”
With a flick of his hand, he picked up the heavyset woman with the Force and hurled her through the window casement. Yoda’s eyes went wide with shock. “You might want to help her,” Dooku said.
With a bound, Yoda was at the casement. Whirry was windmilling down through the black air, screaming and tumbling toward the flagstones. Narrowing his eyes, Yoda reached out through the Force and caught her not three meters from the ground.
Instantly he was in the air himself, spinning away from Dooku’s vicious attack before he was even consciously aware it was coming. The blinding scarlet blur of Dooku’s lightsaber split the air, slashing a burning line along Yoda’s side before chopping his desk in half.
Yoda whipped out his blade while trying to set Whirry gently down on the cobblestones below. “Wish to hurt you, I do not!”
“That’s odd,” Dooku remarked. “I intend to enjoy killing you.”
As Yoda released Whirry from his mind’s hold, and let her spill gently onto the flagstones far below, the tip of Dooku’s lightsaber scored a burning line across his shoulder. The Count’s blade was quick as a viper striking. Among the other Jedi, perhaps only Mace Windu would have been his equal on neutral ground: but here on Vjun, steeped in the dark side, his bladework was malice made visible—wickedness cut in red light. “I’ve hurt you!” Dooku cried.
“Many times,” Yoda said. He considered his pain: let it drop. Now he had nothing but Dooku to focus on, and his lightsaber gleamed with the same fierce green light that flickered from under his heavy-lidded eyes. “But killed me you did not, when you had the chance. A mistake, that was. More than eight hundred years has Yoda survived, through dangers you could not dream.”
“I know how to kill,” Dooku hissed.
Yoda’s eyes opened wide, like balls of green fire. “Yes—but Yoda knows how to live!”
Then their blades clashed together in a lace of fire, green and red: but the green burned hotter. Slowly, slowly, Dooku gave way: and in the dark, drunken Vjun air, Yoda was terrible to behold.
“Yes,” Dooku whispered. “Feel me. Feel the treason. All those years of teaching me, raising me. Trusting me. And here am I, the favored son, butchering your precious Jedi, one by one. Hate me Yoda. You know you want to.”
Count Dooku lashed out with his lightsaber. Yoda took a quick step back and felt the heat of the red blade as it sliced the air centimeters from his tunic. He jumped, spun, and struck at Dooku’s back before he landed. Dooku turned aside at the last moment, whipping his blade across the space where Yoda was seconds earlier. Facing each other again, their blades met, clashed, froze.
“Cunning, are you,” Yoda said, breathing hard.
“I’ve had excellent teachers,” Dooku said.
Yoda dropped and rolled to the side, his lightsaber blazing, reaching for Dooku’s ankles. Dooku leapt up and flipped backwards landing lightly to face Yoda squarely. On his feet again, Yoda whirled and struck at Dooku, his green blade meeting Dooku’s and pushing him back. Dooku attacked with reckless abandon fueled with hatred. Their blades hummed together, hissing and sparking.
Dooku brought his blade down toward the diminutive Jedi Master and Yoda parried, locking his blade against Dooku’s. Yoda breathed, calming himself. “And yet, even here on Vjun, where the dark side whispers and whispers to me…love you enough to destroy you I do.”
Pushing Dooku back yet again, blades flashed and flared stutters of light, blood red and sea green.
Sweat ran in streams through Dooku’s
beard as he countered Yoda’s every move, and his lips were white. Holobattles raged around them as the consoles showed Obi-Wan and Anakin clashing with wave after wave of battle droids. Dooku shot a quick glance at the red button on his desk and, with a Force push, he punched it in.
Yoda cocked his head. “A choice made, have you, Count?”
“I notice I am no longer your apprentice,” Dooku said between breaths. “There was always a chance you could overpower me, of course.” Yoda attacked: Dooku parried. “So I put a missile in high orbit, slaved to this location. It’s falling now. Gathering speed.” Dooku stepped warily back to the open window casement. “Can you feel it dropping? A thorn, a needle, an arrow. Faster all the time.” He paused to get his breath. “Obi-Wan and your precious Skywalker and your little Padawans will be wiped out when the missile hits. So what you need to decide is, what means more to you, Master Yoda? Saving their lives—or taking mine?”
And with that he leapt backward, out the window. Yoda bounded after him. In the dark Vjun air it was all he could do not to leap after Dooku, to fall on him like a green thunderbolt and annihilate him utterly.
…But already he could feel the missile, too, dropping in a red scream through the atmosphere, two hundred armored kilos of explosive aimed for Château Malreaux. With a snort, Yoda turned his eyes to the sky and picked out the glowing dot racing in from the horizon.
Below him, Dooku landed softly on the ground and melted into the rose gardens.
The missile was coming in with terrible speed and power: too much coming at Yoda too fast ever to wholly stop it, even if he had time and perfect peace. But he reached out to pull up the Force binding even Vjun’s bitter green moss and twisted thorn-trees, and let it flow through him like a wind: the breath of a world, gathered and released in a push-feather game with all their lives on the line, not to oppose the missile’s force with force, but to touch it gently on the side—just enough to send it screaming by the broken window casement to plunge a kilometer offshore into the cold and waiting sea.
A long instant later, water fountained from the ocean in a blaze of light three hundred meters tall, and then fell back.
The château and all those inside it had been spared: but Dooku was gone.
Moments later, Yoda trotted down into what had once been the great entryway of Château Malreaux, now a shattered and smoking ruin.
Obi-Wan was thoughtfully toeing the remains of a prime combat droid that his partner had cut in half. “Nice work, Anakin.” He looked around generally, surveying the carnage. “If you were considering a career in interior decoration, though, you might want to take a few more classes.”
“Oh, no,” Anakin remarked. “This is the New Brutalism. I think it will be all the rage if these Clone Wars don’t end soon.”
“Master Yoda!” Obi-Wan said, running across the hallway as the old one came down the great curving staircase. “Are you all right?”
“Sad am I, but unhurt.” The old Jedi sighed. “So close, I was!”
“Did you almost kill Dooku?” Anakin said sympathetically. “How frustrating!”
Yoda gave him an odd look—almost angry.
Anakin didn’t notice. “Perhaps we can still catch him—he must be around here somewhere. I thought we were going to get Ventress once and for all, but she gave us the slip. This place is crazy—honeycombed with secret passages.”
“And battle droids behind every wall,” Obi-Wan added. The familiar rumbling sound of a starship engine coming to life started up in the distance. Obi-Wan headed for the front door.
“Masters!” Anakin hissed. He put a finger over his lips, signaling the others to keep quiet, and edged along the wall of the entry hall until he came to a doorway that led into the mansion’s interior. Touching his lightsaber to life, he leapt into the corridor with a bloodcurdling yell—at exactly the same moment that Scout and Whie leapt from the other direction. For a long, comical instant the three of them were frozen in battle stance, lightsabers glowing, screaming at one another.
Yoda doubled over, wheezing with laughter.
Anakin was the first to recover. “Hey—it’s the small fry!”
“Glad to see you, am I!” Yoda said. “But hurt you are,” he added, his long ear tips furled with worry. Whie’s robes were scorched and slashed by stray fire from Solis’s death throes, and Scout’s hair was clotted with blood.
“It’s nothing,” Scout said, grinning. “We couldn’t be better.”
Whie laughed and threw his arms around Anakin in sheer joy. “I’m so glad you’re not coming to kill me!”
Anakin clapped him on the back, bemused. “Me, too.” Looking back over his shoulder, he said, “You might want to check this one for a head injury, Master.”
“Anakin?” Obi-Wan said.
“Yes?”
“You remember that the first time I met Asajj Ventress, I stole her spaceship?”
“On Queyta, right?”
“And then we met again, and we took her ship again?”
“Right. Why do you mention it?” Anakin said, coming to stand in the doorway beside Obi-Wan.
Together the two of them watched their lovely Chryya rise slowly into the weeping Vjun sky and head for space, accelerating hard. “Oh, no reason,” Obi-Wan said.
12
Obi-Wan’s hands played over the controls of the secondhand Seltaya Yoda had purchased in the Hydian Way. After hours of haggling, the Master had gotten an excellent price, once they included the trade-in value of the two Trade Federation gunships they had hijacked to get off Vjun. “Ready to drop out of hyperspace?”
“More than ready,” Anakin said.
The older Jedi glanced over at the young man, who was grinning with anticipation. I envy him, he thought, surprised.
“What are you thinking, Obi-Wan? I saw you smile.”
“Do you remember Yoda’s little maxim about humility?”
“Humility endless is,” Anakin quoted.
“That’s the one. Did you ever hear Mace Windu’s translation?” Anakin shook his head. “You’re never too old to make another big mistake.”
Obi-Wan set the controls for the drop into subspace. “Coming out of hyperspace into Coruscant space on three: two: one.”
The starship lurched as if taking a wave, the smeared stars collected back into twinkling points, and Coruscant hung burning in the blackness before them as if lit by the souls of her billions.
Anakin looked hungrily at the image of the planet growing larger on the viewscreen, as if, even from the very edge of the solar system, he could almost pick out a particular street, a certain residence, one lit window where another pair of eyes looked up into the stars, waiting for him. “I’m so glad to be home,” he said.
At the far end of the ship, Scout and Whie were looking at the same viewscreen image. Scout shook her head. “Funny to think we’ll be back in the Temple tomorrow. I wonder if it will all seem like a dream.” The instant she said it, she regretted the word dream.
“No, we’re awake now,” Whie said quietly. “The Temple was the dream.”
“Maybe…maybe it won’t come true, your last vision,” Scout said. “Or maybe you misunderstood.”
“Maybe.” She could tell he didn’t believe it. “But it’s all right. I’m afraid of dying,” Whie said. “But I was even more scared that I was going to…” He trailed off. “Still, that didn’t happen, thanks to you. What you said—it was like you gave me myself back. You gave me permission to be good.”
Scout shook her head. “No mind tricks here, Whie. I didn’t do anything. I just knew which way you were going to choose.”
Whie smiled. “Have it your way. Actually, it’s kind of interesting seeing you be humble. I think it’s…cute.”
Scout Force-slapped him upside the head, but only a little. Not nearly enough to stop him laughing. “Vermin,” she said with dignity.
Yoda bustled in from the galley carrying a tray with a bottle of something amber-colored and three glasses. “Wor
ry not,” he said. “Chances to be bad will you have again.” He cackled, pouring out a glass for each of them. “And good. Every instant, the universe starts over. Choose: and start again.”
Scout lifted her glass and peered dubiously at the contents. Yoda snuffed indignantly. “Something nasty Master Yoda would give, think you?”
Scout and Whie exchanged looks. Gingerly, they tilted their glasses and sniffed. The fragrance of fine Reythan berry juice stole through the little cabin, sweet as sunshine on millaflower. “Almost home,” Scout said, bravely tilting her glass and sipping. The juice went down like honeyed summer rain.
“Thanks to you,” Whie said grinning. “I can’t wait to tell everyone how you commandeered those ships at the spaceport to get us off Vjun. ‘Quick, Lieutenant—the Jedi assassins are getting away in their Chryya! We’ve got to scramble up some ships and follow them!’”
“It was you guys doing your Mind Thing that sold it,” Scout said modestly, flushing with pleasure. It was nice of Whie to make her feel as if she had really contributed to the mission, rather than being nothing but the excess baggage Jai Maruk had expected her to be. Jai and plenty of others, she thought, remembering Hanna, her white Arkanian eyes full of contempt during the Apprentice Tournament. She sipped her juice. “Whoa. I just found myself missing Hanna Ding.”
“The Arkanian girl who gave you such a hard time?”
“She’s worried she might be killed in this war,” Scout said, surprising herself. “She doesn’t want to die for nothing. The Jedi matter to her. To all of us. The Order is the only family we have.”
For the second time in as many minutes, she clapped her hand over her mouth. Whie gave her a pained smile.
Yoda snuffed. “Hard it was, I think: to meet your mother after Dooku had fled.”
“All those years she had been waiting,” Whie said. “But the funny thing is, it wasn’t me she was waiting for. Not really. What she lost was her baby, and that baby is gone. When she saw me, she saw a stranger.”
“It was like that when everyone went to Geonosis,” Scout said unexpectedly. “The Temple was just deserted. We tried to do our lessons and be good, but really we were just marking time, waiting for them to come back. Only they never did.” She sipped the juice. “I don’t just mean the ones who died. Even the ones who survived came back different people. Grimmer.”